Karen Matthews (standing outside her home, tearful,
puffy-eyed) If
anybody’s got my daughter, my beautiful princess daughter, please
bring her home safe. Voice Over : (General scenes of police activity) High-profile crimes –
played out on the TV. A person goes missing. A body is found. The
cameras arrive and the police make full use of the publicity.

Gordon Wardell(in front of the camera, sunglasses on, shaky voice) : I would urge anybody who knows anything about the death of my wife
to come forward.VO : (showing clips of people later featured in the programme) Desperate
relatives appear to make appeals for information. It’s emotional.
It’s raw. But sometimes it’s fake.

Pictures of Professor David Canter (DC) and Professor Paul Ekman (DC) : Tonight, the UK’s leading forensic psychologist and the foremost
criminal body language expert in the world examine the tears, the
lies and the videotape.

DC :The big challenge when lying is to keep the whole
fiction unfolding and developing.

PE :The best way to mask a lie is with a strong emotional
display.

VO: (Karen Matthews crying) Could we have known they were
lying?Journalist : I was absolutely taken in
by her. Neighbour : I felt like I’d been punched
in the stomach by someone I trusted. VO: (Karen Matthews smirking) Were the signs there
all along?999
call made by Karen Matthews is played. Operator : Police emergency?

KM :
“Hiya. I want to report my daughter is missing please.”

Operator :
“Right. How old is she?”

KM : “Nine.”

Operator : “Nine?”

VO: “February 19th, 2008. A distraught mother calls 999 to report her
daughter missing. It’s 6.48 in the evening and the temperature is
near freezing.”

Operator :
“What do you call her?”

KM : “Shannon Matthews.” Picture
of Shannon Matthews.

VO:(police activity) “With that phone call, Karen
Matthews triggers the biggest police action in West Yorkshire for 27
years. But is it a smokescreen for the real story? Local reporter,
Richard Edwards, is one of the first to cover the story.

Richard Edwards : (Yorkshire Evening Post) You think, a nine-year-old girl, that is instantly of
interest. But never in a million years did I think the story would
unfold the way it did.

Shannon showing the CCTV footage of her leaving school
the day she disappeared: CCTV photos shown across the world. The
last sighting of missing schoolgirl Shannon Matthews.

VO: (scenes of Dewsbury Moor, people in Shannon t-shirts, putting
up posters, etc) Karen Matthews and her extended family live in
Dewsbury Moor, an estate on the outskirts of Leeds. The strong sense
of community here meant that word soon spreads that Shannon Matthews
is missing. Neighbours are quick to start helping the police search.Julie
Bushby : (Community Organiser) Everybody turned up. People that you
don’t normally see. You know that they live on the estate but
you’ve never spoken to them. But everybody was there, just trying
to do their bit.

VO:(Karen Matthews in slow motion) 24 hours after she made the
999 call, the distraught mother, Karen Matthews, comes out of the
house to make an appeal before the TV cameras.

RE :(Karen Matthews in slow motion again) Not only
were, erm, were the words that she was using all absolutely spot on,
as though she had scripted those, full of emotion, it was her
physical appearance as well that was absolutely striking. She was
every inch the mother who didn’t know what to do, didn’t know
where to turn. I mean, you look at her eyes. They are the eyes of a
woman in utter despair.

VO:(expert at a computer) But to a body language expert, like
Professor Paul Ekman, there’s more to Karen’s behaviour than is
immediately obvious.

DC :It’s very small. That shoulder (points to an image of KM on
the screen in front of him) goes up a little bit. Twice in a row (he
demonstrates with his own shoulder). Behaviour doesn’t occur
randomly. It’s like a slip of the tongue. This is a gestural slip.
She doesn’t know she’s doing it. Every time we have seen it –
and we have seen it in many situations – the person has always been
lying.

News reports of the Shannon case : Once again the police
helicopter hovered over Dewsbury Moor… determined to leave no patch
of ground within sight of Shannon’s front door unchecked.VO:(Karen and Craig outside the house at night in ‘Find
Shannon’ t-shirts, looking concerned) For the media, now
encamped in Dewsbury Moor, Karen Matthews and her partner, Craig
Meehan, sound and look like anxious parents. News interview with them outside one night.

Reporter : Are you hoping that this time next week you haven’t got to have
something like this (meaning a big search event)?

KM : (nodding) Yes. I’m hoping she’s home by then.

VO: But away from the camera lens, people are beginning to notice a
different Karen.

VO:(news reporter and camera in the
street) Now a live broadcast came on that was actually taking
place in the street outside the house. So one of the people in the
house decided to test just how live it was by waving to the camera
outside and rustling the curtains around. Then when this appears on
screen about a second later, there was a big cheer in the room and
Karen was one of those cheering. Now that seemed… That jarred.KM : (inside the house putting clothes into cupboards.Voice
of neighbour) Well, looking back now, yes, she was shy and
tearful in front of the cameras and really outgoing, laughed a lot
and joked when there were no cameras around.

JB ??: She saw the cameras walking down the street and she was jumping up
and down and laughing in the community house. But I just put that
down to nerves.”KM walking around the neighbourhood, child gives her a card for
Shannon.

RE : Karen just didn’t quite seem concerned enough. When she saw
Shannon’s face on the screen she said ‘Here’s Shannon. She’s
famous’. And I remember thinking: She’s not famous. She’s
missing.

Police divers dredging an icy river: Police have left no stone unturned in their search for the
nine-year-old. Every possible hiding place is being examined.

VO: Shannon Matthews has been missing for seven days. Still the search
produces no clues. The police are under pressure. The Madeleine
McCann case is in the forefront of people’s minds and police in
West Yorkshire want to avoid the criticisms of the Portuguese
investigation.

Policeman : This is the biggest operation in my 28 years of service that I’ve
been involved in. But it is important that we do this work in order
to find Shannon.

VO: Thirteen days after Shannon is first reported missing, the police
set up a press conference to appeal for help. But it’s a changed
Karen Matthews who appears on stage.KM taking her seat at the press conference.

RE : Now at this one, Karen’s face is enormously different. The red
rings from her eyes have eased a lot. She still looks pale but she
looks almost serene. She’s so calm.

KM :(at press conference) Well, it’s hard to sleep really. It’s
just… House doesn’t feel the same without… with her not being
there, really. It just…feels empty.

DC :There’s a certain distance in what she’s saying.
She’s not really expressing how she feels. She’s actually saying
what she wants people to know.

KM : (at press conference) Whoever’s got Shannon, just please let her
go. Her family’s missing her. All her friends are missing her at
school.

DC :We see very little signs of anguish, of anxiety, of fear. That
was rather flat, emotionally. But why should it be there? She knows
her daughter is just fine.

KM : (at press conference) Well I think that somebody out there who
knows Shannon…they probably know me as well…and it’s…I just
want her home safe, really.

DC :Pretty well everything she says is actually the truth. She
says that Shannon is probably with someone who knows her.

KM : (at press conference) It makes me think now that I can’t trust
people who are really close to me anymore. I just can’t trust
them.

DC :She actually draws on what she knows to be the truth in order
to keep the whole fiction alive.

RE : She doesn’t cry at all until towards the end when she is asked
by the reporter if she could remember the last words that she and
Shannon exchanged.

KM : (at press conference, nodding and starting to cry) I’ll see you
at tea time, Mum. Love you. Wipes tears from her eyes.

RE : Then the tears come. So was that Karen again the actress turning
the tears on or were those words genuinely said and they did pluck at
Karen’s heartstrings?

DC :So now we see some genuine emotion. Why it occurs at this
point, I have no idea. But the fact that she is capable of it tells
us that its absence right from the start in the earliest points when
you really expect to see it most severely is suspicious.

KM : (at the press conference) with a little teddy bear.

RE : Then Karen picks up Shannon’s favourite teddy bear and holds it
very close to her face and poses for pictures that way. And it’s a
scene that is heavily defined – as was much of the Shannon case –
by the McCanns’ trauma.KM
holding the teddy bear up.DC :She doesn’t quite know what to do with it. It’s totally
different from the way Kate McCann carried the teddy everywhere with
her as some sort of reassurance of her daughter.

RE : I think that is one of the most striking images of the whole
Shannon situation.KM in her house with piles of posters on a table.

VO: Press conference over and Karen Matthews’ behaviour away from
the cameras is getting harder to ignore.

PJ ??: I can remember going into the chip shop and Karen ordered fish and
chips and some other stuff and I ordered my dinner and the guy in the
fish shop said 'That’s all right, Karen. These are on us.’ And
she turned round, started giggling, bold as brass and said ‘Oh I
should get rid of one of my kids more often'.

RE : We’d arranged to go and see them to discuss the story I did for
the following day. So I turned up, knocked on the door and walked in.
And the house was empty. And then the next thing I heard was someone
shouting ‘Boo!’ And then it was Karen, she’d been hiding behind
the living room door, leaped out and tickled me on my sides. And I
was absolutely flabbergasted by that. I mean, what do you make of
that?

KM, Craig and an obscured child in the front room being
interviewed for GMTV.

VO: On the 6th of March, Karen gives an interview to GMTV.

KM : Wherever she is, she’s going to be frightened. And it’s just
breaking everybody’s heart on the street.

GMTV : And what would you say to anyone holding Shannon?

KM : (shaking head) Just let her go.

DC :Just let her go? (shakes his head) This is a NO
(nods) This is a YES

Repeat
of KM on GMTV saying 'Just let her go' while shaking her head.

DC :So she’s caught in a conflict between ‘Please let her go’
and ‘Don’t let her go – you’ve got to keep her.’ So I get
something from this. It’s another gestural slip.

VO: The more Karen Matthews appears on camera, the more her behaviour
is starting to raise eyebrows.KM and Craig in their house looking at cards and letters received
from the public.

VO: Even to the untrained eye.

RE : She almost at times gives a strange half-smile.KM turning away and half-smiling at the camera.

DC :If you’re an anguished mother, we wouldn’t expect that you
would be smiling.

KM on the sofa at home, smirking.

DC :She’s getting a kick out of being able to pull the wool over
the eyes of the community and the police. She thinks this whole plot
is going to succeed. And so far it is succeeding. She’s on
television. The community’s supporting her. Everyone believes her.

KM, Craig and some other adults outside the front door with a
poster. Singing hymns with a vicar.

DC :On a number of occasions, she seems to have a slight sort of,
some people might call it a smirk, a slight upturn of the lips. And I
think that’s actually an indication of embarrassment of what’s
going on...

KM looking embarrassed, smirking.

DC :which a person emotionally engaged with the whole process of
telling the truth wouldn’t express. For a few occasions where she
looks to Craig and you wonder ‘Is she thinking to herself, I wonder
if he knows the truth?’ It sort of implies she’s checking him
out.

KM turning to Craig and studying his face.

DC :But then she will turn her head into his shoulder, which is a
way of getting her face away from the crowd and just hiding any sort
of emotional expression.

KM burying her head in his shoulder so her face cannot be seen.

VO: And there’s a new tactic.KM with Megan Aldridge, Shannon’s best friend.

VO: Deflecting attention from herself by shifting the focus to
Shannon’s best friend, 8-year-old Megan Aldridge.

Megan's father : One time, when they were releasing balloons, Megan didn’t
want to write a message for Shannon. And Karen said to Megan ‘You
write this message and Shannon’ll get it and come home.’ I
thought Karen was taking comfort in Megan but looking at it now it
was just another piece of her plan. That’s all it was. It was a bit
of extra leverage. Definitely.

Flat where Shannon was found.

VO: After 24 days of searching, there is astounding news.

News
reporter : The long search for Shannon Matthews ended just over a
mile from her home. The police’s trail of enquiries led them to the
upstairs flat of a man who lived alone. The back door kicked in by
police who went inside to find nine-year-old Shannon hidden in the
base of a divan bed.

RE : I was at home on my day off. The phone rang. And it was my boss.
So she said ‘Yep, Shannon’s been found in a flat in Batley Carr.’
We know very little at that point about it other than that she was
safe. So I rang Julie. And the first thing Julie was shouting down
the phone to me was ‘Is it true?’Julie Bushby, holding a mobile phone in her hand, shouting to a
group of gathered people ‘It’s true! And nodding her head. People
start to hug one another.

VO: But Shannon’s reappearance is not the end of the story.KM and Craig outside the house after they were told she had been
found. Cameras flashing.

VO: As we’ll see, the biggest drama was yet to come.Zooms
in on KM’s face.

Police activity at a roadside.

News
reporter : It was just before 9 o’clock this morning that a man,
on his way to work, discovered Carol Wardell’s body beside bushes
in a lay-by.

VO :Fourteen years before the Karen Matthews case, the TV cameras
recorded another sensational appeal for help. There’d been a murder
in Warwickshire.

News
reporter : Detectives went to her home and found her husband bound
and gagged and in a severely distressed state.Tony Bayliss walking along the road where the body was found.

VO :Detective Superintendent Tony Bayliss was in charge of the
investigation.

TB : I drove here and arrived at the scene and found Carol Wardell’s
body lying here(points)

hen staff at the Woolwich building society in Nuneaton
called police to say they couldn’t get in because their assistant
manageress, Mrs Wardell, hadn’t turned up for work.Footage
of building society, police tape across the front, zooms in on a
bunch of flowers left by the door.

TB : Our theory was that it was a professional robbery in which Mr
Wardell had been held captive at his home. Mrs Wardell had been
forcibly taken to the building society and forced to open the safe
and that for some reason after that she’d been killed.

Rod Chayter : (Mirror) “This was a huge story. A story like one I
hadn’t covered before.” Press conference. Mr Wardell brought in sitting in a wheelchair.
Sunglasses on.

TB : I thought it was very important for Gordon Wardell to take part
in this press conference because I knew that it would keep the media
interest alive and thereby give us more chance of getting information
in from members of the public.

GW
: (at press conference, shaky voice) I would urge anybody
that knows anything about the death of my wife to come forward.

RC : His account was that he had been out to post a letter for Carol,
gone for a pint in The Brooklands, driven back to Merridon, walked
into his home, smelt cigarette smoke in the home of two non-smokers,
walked into the lounge and there was Carol, trussed up at knife
point.

GW
: (at press conference) As I walked into the lounge, I was
grabbed. That was the first time I saw my wife.

VO : But the assembled press corps smelt a rat.

RC : There was no medical need for him to be in a wheelchair
whatsoever. There was some token hoarseness of the voice, soft
speaking…

GW
: (at press conference) The man had got hold of my wife and was
threatening her with a knife. I was grabbed from both sides from the
back and forced down. He was wearing a clown’s mask, a dark blue
boiler-type suit…

RC : Almost from the word go, the story didn’t seem right. The
clown’s mask seemed to be an unlikely extra detail…

GW
: (at press conference) I lost consciousness and didn’t… The next
thing I know I’m on the floor, bound and gagged.

RC : No sense of grief. No sense of loss. No sense of outrage. No real
anguish at all. Just cold fish.

TB : Well, obviously following the press conference we were hoping
that would stimulate a lot of public interest. Unfortunately it had
the effect that a lot of people came to the view that it was Mr
Wardell who was responsible for the offence. And I even received a
phone call from my mother, who said, more or less ‘What are you
messing about at? It’s obviously that husband who did it.’

TB : I’ve learnt after many years of police experience not to make
snap judgements about people just on the way they happen to behave in
a particular set of circumstances. It’s far more complex than that.
And when you’re dealing with a serious like this, a murder
investigation, you have to keep an open mind and only go where the
evidence takes you.”

GW taking part in a police reconstruction.

VO : The police stage a reconstruction of Wardell’s movements on the
night his wife died.

News
reporter : Mr Wardell had re-traced every step he said he made on
the night before the building society robbery. Mr Wardell said he
hoped the police would make a breakthrough soon.”GW in the pub where he said he was.

GW : Hopefully, yes. That’s why I’m trying to do anything that I
can to help.

RC : The reconstruction was just more of the same, really. Cold.
Emotionless. Calculating. Unblinking. Just as he’d been at the
press conference.

VO : Wardell’s story starts to unravel.

RC : He claimed to have been bantering with one of the bar staff.

Barman : No, I didn’t serve the man and all the staff
have signed police statements to say they didn’t…they don’t
recall seeing him.

RC : His story was falling apart in front of his eyes and he would have
been blind and stupid not to see that.”Outside of the Wardell home, police tape surrounding it.

VO : It’s the fine detail of his lies that lead to Gordon Wardell’s
undoing.

TB : He had said that a cloth was placed over his mouth and he smelt
chemicals and the next thing was he came round 8 or 9 hours after he
said he was attacked. And an eminent member of the Royal College of
Anaesthetists contacted our incident room and said that he knew of no
anaesthetic that would have this particular effect. The pub.

RC : I asked the question later, had he wet himself? Two pints. Tied up
all night.

TB :: There was no evidence that he had urinated. This was nigh-on
impossible. A forensic examination of the house didn’t show any
third parties had been in that house on the evening concerned and it
was a combination of things and a very complex circumstantial case
against Mr Wardell. GW during the reconstruction.

DC : Gordon Wardell is very interesting in contrast to Karen
Matthews because he takes a totally different approach. If you watch
what he’s doing, he is giving an account that he has carefully
thought out, carefully rehearsed, developed and then put this all
together.GW in handcuffs.

VO : The jury unanimously declared Wardell guilty. He was sentenced to
life imprisonment.Picture
of his wife’s face.

PE : The elaborate story that he tells the police suggests this was
pre-meditated. Because that would take preparation to think through.
So it’s likely that this wasn’t momentary loss of impulse,
control or an argument that turned violent. It’s likely that he
knew what he was going to do, prepared an elaborate story, memorised
it so he could give it again and again consistently.

RC : The whole thing was utterly unconvincing. From the word go,
really. I mean, it was fairly dreadful acting. I mean, it is very
difficult to act. He was determined. But in terms of being
convincing, not very good at all.”Other killers featured in this programme.

VO : Most killers try in vain to cover their tracks. But only a few are
brazen enough to stand in front of TV cameras and lie to the world.
In May 2006 in north-west London, Fadi Nasri paid another man to
murder his wife, Nisha.Fadi Nasri and a photo of his wife in her police uniform.

News
reporter : “She came out of her house in her night clothes to
investigate a disturbance. Her husband had gone out to play snooker.
He was called back by the neighbours to find her lying in a pool of
blood.

FN : She had a good heart. Always very, very bubbly. Always willing to
help everyone. Everyone’s grieving and missing her very much. Still
in shock.

DC :One of the challenges of lying is to continue to invent and to
give information that you are developing so one of the ways in which
people cope with lying is actually by avoiding saying anything that’s
not true.Police activity.

VO : The fact that Nasri didn’t commit the actual murder himself may
have made that easier.

FN : Obviously someone’s got a guilty conscience. They’ll be
worrying about what they’ve done or shocked or maybe it was an
accident or a mistake or…or…whatever. You know, er… But
someone’s got to know something.

VO : Soham, Cambridgeshire. 2002. One of the most infamous killers in
recent times, Ian Huntley. Interviewed 11 days after murdering
schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, his portrays no hint of
emotion.

IH : (News report) It doesn’t help the fact that I was one
of the last people to speak to them, if not the last person to speak
to them. I keep reliving that conversation, thinking perhaps
something different could have been said. Perhaps kept them here a
little bit longer. Maybe changed events.

Reporter : Of course at the time it was just a normal chat with two girls
that you knew.

Huntley
nodding.

IH :Well that’s just it. I didn’t even know them.

DC :If you listen to what he says, he actually says ‘I was the
last person to see them’

Repeated
footage of IH claiming to be the last person to speak to them.

DC : “How does he know he is the last person? If they were abducted
by somebody else, somebody else would have seen them.”

Other press conferences featured in the programme.

VO : Other killers don’t appear so composed under the spotlight. The
ones that look for public sympathy by shedding tears.Paul Dyson, crying.

PD : I love her to bits. I just want her back.

VO : But what lies behind the tears? Are they for real or just for
show?